FIG. 1 (Prior Art) is a simplified diagram that illustrates operation of one type of conventional digital camera. An image is captured by an image sensor 1, and the captured image data is digitized. The digitized image data is stored into a memory integrated circuit 2 as indicated by arrow 3. The image data is then to be image processed through what is sometimes called an “image pipeline”. Various different types of processing are performed on the image data in the image pipeline. This processing may include, for example, Bayer-to-RGB conversion, white balancing, autoexposure, autofocus, color correction, gamma correction, unsharp masking, mirroring, resizing, and color space conversion. A stage of the pipeline performs one of these types of processes. Many of these processes operate on regions of pixels that span multiple rows of pixels. Consequently, multiple rows of pixels are read into the image processing integrated circuit 4 as indicated by arrow 5 so that a necessary region of pixels is in integrated circuit 4 for processing. A first type of processing is then performed by a first stage 6, and the result of the processing is stored in a buffer memory 7. Each such stage of integrated circuit 4 operates in a similar fashion. Between each pair of adjacent processing stages is a buffer memory for holding the data as it passes from one stage to the next through the pipeline.
Over time, the size of digital images captured on conventional consumer market digital cameras has increased from three, to four, to five, to six megapixels and more. Due to this increase in image capture size, the buffer memories within image processing integrated circuits have increased. There are many such buffer memories in an image processing integrated circuit that has many stages in its pipeline. The increase in the size of the buffer memories has an undesirable effect on the manufacturing cost and power consumption of the overall image processing integrated circuit. As the consumer digital camera market demands ever larger digital images, the costs of the image processing integrated circuit component of the digital camera will likely increase noticeably not due to the processing circuitry on the image processing integrated circuit, but rather just due to the buffer memory required between stages.